Chief Human Resources Officers,
One of the items we will have on our January HR Council agenda is the concept of consolidating all of our public safety related career banding salary ranges to the established “Metro” rates rather than maintaining two separate set of ranges. The University now has unfettered authority from OSHR to use the “Metro” rates as we deem appropriate. That was not always the case.
Several items contributing to this thinking:
- The Board of Governors is very interested in strengthening the University’s campus police departments and by creating the campus safety fee in the last several years was especially interested in assuring our University Police Officers are paid highly competitive salaries compared to state-wide labor markets for law enforcement officers. We continue to get questions and active interest from the BOG’s Committee on Audit, Risk Management, and Compliance with respect to the competitiveness of our Campus Police Officer compensation.
- Since OSHR is not permitting us to update our career banding salary ranges this year, the non-Metro salary ranges will increasingly lag market. Adopting the higher “Metro” rates uniformly will help counter this.
- We have heard anecdotally from the campus police chiefs that campus police officer recruitment and retention is increasingly challenging, not just based on regular labor market trends, but given the greater perceived challenges and risks of functioning as a law enforcement officer.
- There is an inherent complexity and overhead in maintaining two sets of salary ranges for identical SHRA job classifications. Presently, almost 60% of the University’s public-safety related job classifications are now using “Metro” rates. It would seem to make sense to consolidate around the majority of usage between the two established salary range structures.
We have reached no final decision on this point, but are considering this change. For this reason, I wanted to provide HR Council with some background so that you would have some time to contemplate this and contribute to a discussion of this topic at our upcoming meeting.
I would emphasize that this doesn’t imply any mandated salary adjustments except in the instance of individuals who would fall below the minimum of the “Metro” range. Absent that, salary adjustments would continue to be at the discretion of campus leadership.
I look forward to our conversation on this topic and seeing you all at our upcoming HR Council meeting in Chapel Hill.
One correction to my note above. I was reminded that the mins and maxes for the Metro and Non-Metro rates are identical. These just differ on the market rates at each competency level. So, there would be no impacts in terms of anyone falling below a salary range minimum from the existing salary structures. Sorry for that confusion.